Explore the weird and wonderful history of our county in a new book, Kent’s Strangest Tales – it’s life but not as you know it,writes Chris Price reports.

After a glance at Kent’s Strangest Tales, it very quickly becomes clear that the history of Kent has been far from dull.

"Caesar fought woad-painted tribesmen here, and marauding Vikings felled an Archbishop of Canterbury with an ox bone”, enthused author Martin Latham.

"Along Kent’s northern shore, Pocahontas died, Nelson’s ships were built and Sir John Franklin set sail on his doomed expedition to discover the Northwest Passage. And Kent invented chavs; they come from Chatham,” he added.

This latest addition to the Strangest… series of books is something of a treasure trove of trivia. It has been compiled by Martin, who has managed Waterstones in Canterbury for 21 years.

Yet far from being purely an oddball historical account of Kent, the book also includes myths and looks at the county’s nature and its paranormal tales, including the UK’s most haunted village, Pluckley.

The book begins by heralding Kent as the location of Britain’s oldest highway and dating it at 600,000 BC. Quite an achievement, considering homo sapiens only originated in Africa some 200,000 years ago.

In the opening paragraph, readers’ eyebrows are raised as the book details that the English Channel was created about 400,000 years ago and before that “bipedal homonids” entered England by walking the chalk ridge that stretches from Calais to Dover and continues through Kent as the North Downs.

“Kent was Early Man’s bridgehead into Britain” explained Martin, pointing out that Kent is the richest county in England for archaeological finds of prehistoric man.

Then the book gets positively strange, as it unveils how Kent’s early man shared the land with rhinos and buffalos at around 400,000 BC.

This was during a warm and wet period of about 45,000 years, between two ice ages. A skeleton of a giant elephant, the size of a double-decker bus, was found in the mud by builders working on Ebbsfleet Station in 2004. It had been killed by early Kentish people, using wooden spears.

The Most Hated Man in Kent History? tells of vicar Richard Culmer, a strict Puritan in the 17th century. He made it his life’s campaign to impose his views on others, leading to his enforced retirement after suing locals at his church in Minster, near Ramsgate, for unpaid church rents.

At one stage, he was pulled from his pulpit and crushed with a plank until he vomited blood, but he still would not leave.

Earlier in his career, fired-up at the outbreak of the English Civil War, Culmer began smashing stain-glass windows at Canterbury Cathedral.

As a result, the people of the city came out en masse to stop the man they had come to call Blue Dick (he wore blue robes).

“Culmer’s account omits to mention that, as the townspeople approached, he weed himself in the cathedral, for fear, his son said, that they would 'knock out his brains’” pointed out Martin.

“Like many bullies, he seems to have been a coward at heart.”

Working through how the Luftwaffe bombed the county and how Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had a chance meeting on a train in Dartford, the book then ends in 2011.

It looks at the restoration of Victorian actress Ellen Terry’s dress, which she wore in a production of Lady Macbeth.

On show at her former home at Smallhythe Place in Tenterden, it is decorated with 1,000 beetle wings. Strange but true.

Kent’s Strangest Tales by Martin Latham is published in paperback by Portico, an imprint of Anova Books, and costs £7.99.